Page 100 of Fire and Icing

“What a way to start off your relationship with a woman,” Greyson says. “Is she still speaking to you after spending a full week away?”

“Yes, she’s speaking to me. Of course she is.”

“I’ve never seen a relationship go from zero to sixty as fast as yours,” Cody says.

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

“She had a chip on her shoulder. Now you two are living together and you just spent a week on vacation together.”

He starts cracking up and the other guys join him.

“Not living together,” I mutter. “She’s two stories above me.”

“You can say that again,” Cody teases.

“Ha. Ha,” I deadpan.

“Seriously, though,” Patrick says. “How are things with her now?”

“Good. We’re good.”

I have the strongest urge to tell him everything—how we’ve been faking, but I’m not faking anything with her anymore. But I can’t tell him. Emberleigh and I agreed we’d keep our faking secret, so I have to keep everything to myself at the station for a while longer.

I don’t even know what Emberleigh wants—she’s made it clear she’s not open to dating. But that kiss, the way she’s been confiding in me, the way she laughs with me … She even dozed off curled up against me, like she trusted me to be her safe place … All of it feels far more real than a charade.

We finish cleaning the truck and the engine and doing equipment checks. We get a call for a rescue mid-afternoon.

“Goat stuck on a trampoline,” Captain calls out into the bay with a straight face.

“Did he just say …?” I ask.

“Goat on a trampoline? Yeah,” Greyson says.

The four of us grab our gear and take our seats in the truck. We drive to the outskirts of town, down some country roads and arrive at the property.

The owner meets us on the driveway. “Jenny’s up on the trampoline! I can’t get her to come down.”

“We’ll get her,” Cody tells the woman. “Stay back in case Jenny decides she’s not happy with our attempts to rescue her.”

The woman nods, hands Cody a treat of some sort, and steps back toward the porch.

We round the corner, and sure enough, there’s a goat on the trampoline. Every time she takes a step, the surface sinks or springs unexpectedly. She freezes, but then jerks around as if someone pushed her. Then she baaaaas a fully offended noise that must be goat for, “EXCUSE me?!”

I approach the trampoline carefully. The goat eyes me suspiciously.

I stare at her.

She stares back.

Then she takes another step. Her hoof slides a little. She tries to stabilize herself by stiffening her legs. When that doesn’t work, she starts to move backward in a goat-style moonwalk.

I start hummingBillie Jeanby Michael Jackson. The goat freezes.

Cody laughs under his breath. “Whoa. Jenny. Easy.”

“I don’t even know how this happened,” the woman says, wringing her hands in the doorway. “I turned my back for one second and when I looked out the window, there she was. Just bouncing.”

Jenny gives me a half-hearted bleat, then shifts her hooves in that twitchy, suspicious way that tells me she’s thinking about going full feral.

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